THE CON^JEDETJITE SOLDIEFw Carr ADDRESS OF GENERAL JULIAN S. CARR '*Tke Confederate Soldier" Reunion, Richmond, Va. June 2, 1915 Sty* Ethraqj of ttjP 31ntnf rstlg of Nortlj (Earoltna QloUrrtton of North. CteoUmatta cOit Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/addressofgeneralOOcarr THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIER" To speak to my beloved Comrades, who wore the Gray, wherever they may light the camp fires of Re- union, and live again the glory, the fierce joy, and alas the sorrow of lurid years of battle, is a privi- lege to be cherished. But hero indeed is he, to be doubly envied, who comes to the council fires at the heart of the Confed- eracy, whose privilege it is to grasp the welcoming hand and meet the kindly glance of dear old comrades whose life-blood baptized the sacred soil of Virginia from the Chickahominy to the James, from Malvern Hill to Gettysburg. Fellow Comrades, in assembling here in the City of Richmond for reunion, embargoes our hearts and minds with memory of the days when Richmond op- ened her hospitable gates, as the headquarters of the Confederacy, and sought to present a home to the great Mississippian who was its first and only presi- dent. And the story of Virginia's fidelity through the long years of siege and privation is one of the most precious of the sibylline leaves of history. This country needs the record of the Confederate soldier to make full and complete the narrative of its greatness and renown. The humblest private who wore the Gray with honor will go down to his final rest with such rank in the pantheon of history that Knights Errant and chivalrous, and the decorated Wearers of Stars and Garters of the Legion of Honor, or the Golden Fleece, never knew. This is no declaration of the enthusiasm of the hour in the empty compliment to comrades and friends ; it's the veritable truth of history ; it's the declaration of Fame around the world. To look back for fifty years to the opening of the great struggle reveals one of the most sublime spectacles of moral grandeur that the world has ever witnessed. When Aeneas, who bore upon his shoulders his aged father Anchises from the flames that consumed Troy, was bidden by the Queen of Carthage to recite the tragic story of the fall of Troy, he gave expression to his unutterable grief in the question, "Who of the Myrmydons, or what follower even of the stern Ulysses, could refrain from tears at such recital ?" I have no words that I can trust to utterance expres- sive of my feelings, when I attempt the recital of the deeds of daring and of valor of the Confederate soldier. The difference in the character of the great body of troops in the armies that opposed each other along the Potomac and the James has often been mentioned and the price paid by the South when her bravest and best sons were laid a bloody sacrifice upon her coun- try's altars. It is only when one applies the test of facts that this startling difference most fully appears. Con- trast the record of the professors of Harvard and of Virginia's William and Mary, the two oldest insti- tutions of learning in America. The Massachusetts Institution, with its great numbers and means and its hundreds of professors, had one volunteer to serve upon the field from its patriotic faculty. The Vir- ginia college, William and Mary, sent thirty-two out of its thirty-five professors and instructors to join the army in the field. General Whittier, of their own people, has pointed out that although Massachusetts paid thirteen mil- lions of dollars from the State in bounties to obtain patriots for military service, besides many millions more from her leading cities and towns, yet a list of Massachusetts artillery and infantry regiments, con- taining 20,957 men, exhibits but 95 men of the whole number killed in battle. This moved the General to declare before his State Historical Society, with rare candor and justice : "This does not indicate brilliant or useful service, and yet the material was probably better than that of any other regiment of the State. The same class of men in the South was in the thick- est of the fight, and their intelligence and pariotism did a great work." Comrades, the more the history of the War between the States is studied with the simple truthful facts as history will sift them, the more and yet the more, without hard feelings toward others, you and I may thank God that we wore the Gray. It rejoices the heart to linger in those days of chiv- alric daring when every man in the ranks was there upon the mission of victory, and rank and pelf were naught in the eye of duty. Think what manner of men commanded such troops. How grandly looms forth the character of gentleman and Christian from the great commander- in-chief, upon whose head Bishop Meade had bowed in blessing upon his dying bed — and the stern Com- 3 mander who wrestled in prayer through the night, before he led his column into battle, to the third in the great trio of our countrymen, whose memory is revered by every true Southerner, Jefferson Davis. In the language of our distinguished Commander : "We need not go to the lands of Plato and Pericles, of Cicero and Csesar, for examplars and heroes, expo- nents and martyrs. We have them at home. They fell upon every field — from Bull Run to Appomat- tox. And the world has yet to witness in soldiers of the line, truer devotion to their flags, a higher sense of martial individuality and intelligent efficiency than that displayed by the volunteer private soldiers in the Confederate armies from 1861 to 1865. The blood of these martyrs shall be the deeds of new life and new liberty for all the ages. And the fadeless memories of these true men, without marble and without brass, should be eternal." If every patriotic Northern man, every brave Un- ion soldier, every honest citizen of the United States would recognize the fact that the Southern people were neither rebels nor traitors, the ends of fairness would be subserved, sectionalism would be dead, we would be more closely united in the bonds of fra- ternal citizenship and every star in our flag would shine the brighter. The North achieved the victory and the South reaped the glory in the most tremendous military struggle of our hemisphere, one of the most desperate, sanguinary and heroic wars of all history. I would speak of the Southerner before the war, during the war, and after the war, and in all these relations he discovered as much civic virtue, displayed as daunt- less valor, and exhibited, under adverse fortune, as 4 admirable fortitude as history credits to any people it gives account of. jSTot so long ago there were many at the North to deem us traitors, and "Southern treason" was the campaign cry of those who marched under the folds of the "bloody shirt." We are yet stigmatized as rebels by some of our loyal compatriots. To the lat- ter epithet the South has no very particular objec- tions. During the Christian era the three grandest names in political history are Alfred the Great, Wil- liam the Silent, and George Washington. Technical- ly the first of this important trio was a rebel. Actu- ally and legally the last two were rebels, and the last named and greatest and grandest of the lot was a Southerner and a slave-holder. The Confederate soldier is perfectly willing to accept association with these demigods and cordially adopt the classification, and we do it with the more pride and alacrity when we reinforce them, and incalculably augment their glory, by adding to their numbers the Miltiades of the 19th century — the world's greatest hero — Robert E. Lee, whom the South, to remotest generations, will ever esteem the noblest personality mentioned in all profane history. The men of the South, though of a soldier race, loved peace as devotedly as any people of any clime of any age, and it is a slander and a falsehood to say that they wantonly plunged their country into a bloody war. They were the weaker section, — comparatively few in numbers, lamentably weak in resources, and deplorably slender in wealth. They were a high- minded, proud race with lofty contempt for all mean- ness, true to plighted faith, and endowed with an ex- quisite sense of personal honor universal in its observ- ance and fanatic in its sincerity. "Nor duke nor prince am I, I am the Sieur de Coucy," might have been the device of proud humility award- ed by heraldry to tens of thousands of Southern families. Have you gentlemen ever considered, with the eye of philosophy, the character of that civilization, which has passed away forever ? Have you reflected that no man went hungry, whatever might have been his color ; that while the highways were wretched, the jails were practically empty; that charity was a per- sonal matter, not a state concern; that brotherhood applied to its most acid test, to-wit : the endorsement of your neighbor's paper was almost universal; that while justice was administered in the temple, honor regulated affairs in the field, and that leadership was acquired and kept by the practice of the virtues of courage, consistent conduct, intelligent appreciation of the duty to be done. I mean to call no honor roll in proof of this state- ment. The names of the worthies rise fresh in your most casual count. These are the laurels with which the great dead of our Southland are worthy to be crowned withal. The South was not responsible for African slavery in this hemisphere and slavery at the South was the gentlest and the most beneficent servitude mankind has ever known. There was a fellowship and an af- fection existing between master and slave at the South beautiful and delightful to contemplate and that no- body but Southern folk who saw it and acted it can understand or appreciate. When that demoniac mon- 6 ster, John Brown, brought fire and sword across the line to carry to every Southern household, the slave was more terror-stricken than his master was enraged. And to show how little the North knew of the simple and beautiful trust and affection that existed between the master and his slave we have but to revert to a speech of William II. Seward, made in 1860, who opined that the South would never go to war for her rights, for the Southern people knew that the slaves would rise, massacre the Southern whites and give their roofs to the flames. The South did go to war. Southern men with the most implicit trust left their wives and children to the protection of their slaves and during those four long, doleful, disastrous and terrible years, filled with so much excruciating suf- fering and crowned with such effulgent glory, not a single outrage was perpetrated by a slave in a single community at the South. The South rebelled — I am willing to call it that — because the isorth insisted that the stronger section was not bound by the Constitution. The South knew that slavery could not exist in Kansas, or JSTebraska, or California, or Oregon. The climate forbade. What the South contended for, and all she demanded, was the right guaranteed to her in the fundamental law of the land to maintain which both sections had solemnly plighted faith. The rights of the South as ascertained by the adjudications of the Supreme Court were set at naught by the dominant party of the jSTorth which held that the Constitution was "a mere scrap of paper," that it was "a league with death and a covenant with hell," that there was "a higher law," unwritten and interpreted by the con- science of the stronger party to the compact of 1789. 7 That made the war and that war surely would have come had there not been a single slave in the Western Hemisphere. The late John James Ingalls was a Yankee of the Yankees, transplanted to the congenial soil of "bleed- ing Kansas." He was a very candid man and scorned a subterfuge. Here is what he said in an elaborate address on the negro question about a year before he retired from the United States Senate : "The conscience of New England was never thor- oughly aroused to the immorality of African slavery until it ceased to be profitable." Precisely. And African slavery would be in the green tree and exuberantly flourishing In our blessed and beloved land of liberty this very moment had it been as profitable in Massachusetts and Iowa as it was supposed to be in South Carolina and Arkansas. Let me call your attention to an historical item, which, while not unnoticed, has, in my judgment never received its dues at the hands of historians. That of the twelve million men who followed the for- tunes of the South, eight million only were of our race, and of these it is a liberal estimate to say that not exceeding four hundred thousand had any vital interest in slavery. Perhaps it is not an extravagant statement to make that there exists no record where such power as they weilded was ever possessed by the same number of freemen in any stage of this world's history. How wisely, how patriotically, how astute- ly they used their power; how they united their friends and divided their opponents; how they ac- quired Louisiana and Florida ; how they made war for the second time on England; how they aided Texas in her struggle for freedom, and ended by ab- sorbing, on equal terms with themselves, her terri- tory; how they acquired the gold of California, the timber of Oregon; how they swayed the growing in- terests of this great Republic from infancy to the virile manhood of I860, when reluctantly they left to found another government. There are many admirable traits in the New Eng- land character, there is much to commend even in the Puritan of that ilk; but the Puritan had a most un- ruly and refractory conscience that suffered the ag- onies of the damned for the shortcomings and trans- gressions of others. It was the terrible New England conscience that put an end to the movement for eman- cipation of the slaves at the South that promised so great success the first four decades of the last century. When the New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed there were a great number of anti-slavery so- cieties at the South, and had the Puritan conscience behaved itself with any sort of moderation and de- cency all the border 'States of the South would have voluntarily emancipated their slaves. Even such a fire-eater as Henry A. Wise of Virginia, was only restrained from emancipating his slaves by the fact that when he contemplated it he looked around and made the discovery that the free negroes of Virginia were in much worse condition, morally and material- ly, than their fellows in bondage. The Chief Jus- tice who delivered the Dred Scott decision emanci- pated every slave he owned except those too old or too feeble to earn a support. When New England went into the anti-slavery business, the South, where there was a vast store of human nature, resented it, and the emancipation con- tingent at the South shrank to insignificant numbers. Though Henry Clay, the Breckinridges, and the Un- derwoods were anti-slavery men, the emancipationists of Kentucky made a miserable showing when the new Constitution of that State was adopted in 1850. Instead of an "open clause," that would have pro- moted emancipation and ultimately secured the ex- tinction of slavery in the commonwealth, there was no provision for amendment whatever, and emanci- pation became practically a political impossibility. The jSTew England Anti-Slavery Society was respon- sible for that action in a 'State where the emancipa- tion sentiment had been very strong. In Virginia and North Carolina the emancipation movement dwindled till it became a negligible quantity in the political and social equation. Zeb Vance, known and loved where Southern blood courses in Southern veins and the idol of the Tar Heels, was an anti-slavery man at heart, but the meddling New Englanders stifled his principles. The people of the South were of a proud race, and while there was an aristocracy there, it was a gentry of honor rather than of birth, and here in our be- loved South of that tremendous epoch the distance, political and social, between the rich man and the poor man was shorter than anywhere else on this earth in any period of the world's history. Here in the old South the slightest stain on a public man's reputation meant political annihilation and social ostracism. It was the grandest squirehood and the finest yeo- manry any country ever boasted. In 1860 the North, the dominant section, gave power for the first time in our history, to a party al- together sectional and made no concealment of the new policy that the Constitution was a mere scrap 10 of paper and the higher law the supreme law of the land. It was a challenge to the South and the South was prompt to lift the gage. The first quarter of the last century the right of secession from the Federal Union by a sovereign State, one of the parties to the compact that made the American sisterhood, was little ques- tioned. It was threatened by Massachusetts when it was proposed to admit Louisiana as a State of the Union and nobody challenged Mr. Quincy when in the Federal Senate he declared that in the event the new State became one of the sisterhood it would be the 'duty of some as it was the right of all the States to recall the powers they had delegated in the Constitu- tion and withdraw from the Union, and there is not the slightest doubt that the victory of General Jack- son at New Orleans and the treaty of peace negotiated at Ghent bringing to a close the War of 1812 pre- vented the secession of some of the New England States in 1815. Had it come then the separation would have been peaceable. But by 1860 the Union, child of the statecraft of the South mainly, had waxed in power and wealth and influence until our Republic was recognized as one of the leading nations of the world. During that seventy years the South was dominant in the councils of state at the national capital and with a lofty dis- interestedness had allowed the more populous and more wealthy North to profit most in a material sense from the advantages and blessings of the government. She sold her wares abroad in a free trade market and purchased the supplies necessary to her household economy in the domestic protected market. All she asked in return was the acknowledgment and ob- 11 servance of lier equal rights as defined in the Consti- tution, the character of the Union. Then the South seceded and as the event disclosed war was inevitable. The antagonists were most un- evenly matched. In numbers, in wealth, in resources, in financial credit, the ISTorth was overwhelmingly the superior. In addition the more powerful section had an established government and flag everywhere recog- nized and respected by alien peoples. But the South scorned to count the cost. She dared "to put it to the touch," and staked her all upon the issues of battle. The manhood of the South sprang to arms : "The fisher left his skiff to rock On Tamar's glittering waves ; The rugged miners poured to war From Mendip's sunless caves." It was a magnificent civilian soldiery that delivered battle for the South. It was not an army of slave- holders, either, for in its ranks were tens of thou- sands, many of them of the field and staff as well as of the rank and file, who gladly would have brought about emancipation of the slave could they have seen a provident and a beneficent way to accomplish it. It was an army terribly in earnest — freemen fight- ing for freedom led by captains with a genius for war that is the wonder and admiration of soldiers of every clime. For four years the unequal stgruggle continued. The best and bravest fell in action. Our territory was overrun by the enemy and much of it devastated. It was a combat of six Southern men against twenty-eight adversaries, for the North had enrolled 2,800,000 and the South but 600,000. The disparity in wealth and resources was even greater, 12 for the jSTorth had the world to draw upon and the South was dependent on her own slender resources. Eo soldiery of any age or clime ever displayed more genius for arms than did the legions of the South in our great struggle of 1861-65 and there is more buried valor in the heroic bosom of old Virginia than in all the rest of our heisphere besides. When Stonewall Jackson struck the enemy, overwhelmingly superior in numbers, at Chancellorsville, he and his invincible infantry "Came as the winds come when forests are rended, Came as the waves come when navies are stranded." And the "rebel yell" ! It was the fiercest and the most terrible war cry ever practiced by the sons of Mars. Of another summons to battle a great poet sang : "By this, though deep the evening fell, Still rose the battle's deadly swell, For still the Scotts, around their King, Unbroken, fought in desperate ring. Where's now their victor va-ward wing, Where Huntly and where Home ? O for a blast of that dread horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, That to King Charles did come, When Rowland brave, and Olivier, And every paladin and peer, On Ronceavalles died!" And the rebel yell was more inspiriting to its own ranks and more appalling to the foe than all the trumpets that had urged to slaughter in all the other wars of profane history. Ere the inevitable had come our depleted ranks were somewhat replenished when he recruited from the cradle and the grave, grandsires of three score and youths in their early 13 teens, and again one may revert to heroic lines com- memorative of another "Lost Cause" : "Low as that tide has ebbed with me, It still reflects to memory's eye The hour, my brave, my only boy Fell by the side of great Dundee. Why, when the volleying musket played Against the bloody Highland blade, Why was I not beside him laid? Enough — he died the death of fame; Enough — he died with conquering Graeme !" Notwithstanding their overwhelming superiority in numbers, in resources, in equipment, in supplies of every description, the South was not beaten on the field, for it was the blockade of Southern ports that forced the surrender. Just as the navy of Great Brit- ain overthrew Napoleon, so it was the navy of the Federal Government that overcame the South. Had we been able to freely exchange our cotton for money and supplies from abroad our finances would not have gone to such deplorable and hopeless wreck and our armies could have withstood all the masses of the enemy another four years. The South was beaten by a series of IFS. Had we not fired the first gun at Sumter the North could never have recruited a million of men to invade us. Had Johnston not fallen at Shiloh in April at the head of his victorious legions he would have occupied Chicago ere the summer solstice. Had Stonewall Jackson escaped the bullet that slew him he would have destroyed or captured the army of the Potomac. Had the charge at Gettysburg been made six hours earlier, as was ordered, that decisive field would have been a Southern victory, Washington, Baltimore, and 14 Philadelphia would have fallen, and Europe would have interposed to put an end to the slaughter. But it was not to be. The God of Battles ordered otherwise and His decree was that the ISTorth should have the victory and the South should reap the glory of that mighty conflict. So be it. We are content. I have yet to see or to hear of any Southern man who wore the Gray and did his brave devoir on stricken field who is not proud of the deeds of the sons of the South from the firing on Sumter to Appomattox. As the years pass by more and more is known of the sublime position of the South in her effort for independence. She met the inevitable in the spirit of General Maury's farewell order to the men of the Southwest : "Conscious that we have played our part like men; confident of the righteousness of our cause, without regret for our past, without despair of the future." We can afford, my dear comrades to wait. Our cause for the defense of which so many brave South- ern boys gave up their lives will find justification in the tides of Time. True, it may be, and true it is, that now, the uncultured, the under bred, and the ma- licious find it in their hearts to speak of the followers of Lee and Jackson as rebels and traitors. I wish such as these had been with me on a recent Sabbath. It was a perfect Holy Day. I drove to Chestnut Oak Ridge Meeting House in Orange County to worship God with my neighbors, out under the boughs of those grand old spreading oaks, where the pure air is uncontaminated with the foul odors of the city slums; where the skies look bluer and the thunder heads flit across the horizon like playful young lambs, and where the water gushing from the foot of the 15 meeting house hill, is clear and cool and sparkling — fit for the gods. It was recess, and I strolled through the grave- yard in the rear of the Meeting House, when my at- tention was arrested by what was to me, a very touch- ing inscription upon an unpretentious headstone. In June 1861, at a country boarding school, I had said "good-bye" to Albert Holmes, as he marched away to join the Confederate army. He was a handsome, manly young fellow, and was extremely popular. His fine physique would command attention in any crowd. He was quitting school in obedience to his country's call. I had oftentimes made inquiry about the hand- some Albert Holmes of my school boy days. The only information I ever obtained was "he was killed in the army." I found him that Sunday morning; lov- ing hands had brought his bullet ridden body back to the burying ground of the old country church, where from cradled infancy, he had been taught to worship God, and tenderly laid him there to sleep the dreamless sleep of death, in the quiet solitude of that majestic old forest, where the red breast robin in the spring-time will bring its mate to nest in the over- hanging boughs, and where the thrush will sit a sil- ent sentinel at the sunset hour, warbling its sweet notes as a requiem to the dead soldier. I stopped to read the epitaph of my dead soldier friend and school- mate. It was short but meant so much. It was this : "In obedience to the laws of my country, I fill a soldier's grave." Tell me that Albert Holmes, upon whose head-stone is carved such sentiments, was a rebel and a traitor % It is a lie, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth when I cease to de- clare it. 16 A monument recently placed in a cemetery at Louisville, Ky., bears inscriptions to the memory of John Austin, a soldier of the Revolution, James Allen Austin, his son, a soldier of the war of 1812, James Grigsby Austin, his grand-son, a soldier of the War with Mexico, and James Richard Gathright, his great-grandson, a Confederate soldier who was killed at Murfreesboro, Tenn., Jan. 1st, 1863. All were privates. Can it be that a soldier with such an ancestry, rich in the annals of his country's history, was a rebel and a traitor ? Away with the miserable miscreant who would dis- honor such memories ! Just one more illustration. The community in which I was reared was fortunate enough to num- ber among its cultured citizenship the pure and able Carolinian that lent dignity to the Supreme Court bench of the State, that Christian jurist, Judge Wil- liam H. Battle. He gave to the Confederate army two sons as pure as woman and as brave as Marshall Ney. I knew them in my youth, and my young life was made purer and better for having known them. One fell at Sharpsburg and one at Gettysburg. I well remember the day when their lifeless bodies were brought back to Chapel Hill, to be laid to rest in the quiet cemetery of their native town, both in one grave. I can never forget the sorrow that filled every heart, and the deep grief that was depicted on every counte- nance and the sympathetic courtesy that barred each place of business in the town, as the silent cortege wended its way to the cemetery. Hearts too full to give utterance to their feelings tenderly laid Junius 17 and Lewis Battle to rest that day. Tell me we were burying rebels and traitors ? Until the stars burn out in their sockets, it is our duty to declare that it was an interment of Christian patriots. Those who utter this base culmination are densely ignorant or infamously false. We despise the coward- ly aspersion. We protest against it in the name of Mecklenburg and Alamance, King's Mountain, Cow- pens, Guilford Court House and Yorktown. We spurn it, in the name of eighty years of American history, during which time the counsels of this Re- public were directed and controlled by Southern statesmen. Who wrote the Declaration of Independ- ence ? Whose sword beat back the hosts of Britain ? What jurist most adorned the Supreme Bench of this ISTation ? Whose tongue fired the American heart with love of freedom and cried "Give me liberty or give me death !" Whose valor at Xew Orleans cut to pieces the flower of the English army and rolled back the tide of invasion ? Vile culminator he who dares affirm that one drop of rebel blood ever flowed in the veins of the de- scendants of Jefferson, and Jackson, and Patrick Henry, and Marshall and Madison, and George Washington and their compatriots. Rebels ! the battle flags of the Confederacy flut- tered over half a continent and the thunder of its guns echoed around the globe. When before in the history of the world were there such rebels ? It was not a rebellion but a gigantic war. The companionship existing between comrades in arms is the closest and dearest fellowship that comes to men. They have faced dangers and endured hard- ships together for the sake of a principle for which 18 willingly they would yield their lives. This senti- ment of brotherhood is always stronger among the vanquished than it is with the victors, else human nature would be even more frail than it is. The hardships of the bivouac, the fatigues of the march, the dangers of the battle line bring about a fellow- ship unknown to peaceful walk, and this sentiment has made heroes of thousands who were constitu- tionally timid. The soldier of the South endured greater hardships than did his adversary of the North. Our equipment was inadequate, our food in- sufficient, yet the South fought to exhaustion. On the other hand the enemy was the amplest equipped, the best fed, the best clothed, the most formidably armed soldiery who had heretofore gone to war. These things should be considered when we contem- plate the mortal struggle between the six and the twenty-eight. Any estimate of the man in gray is incomplete without a scrutiny of his conduct after the war. I harbor no resentment against our adversaries of 1861- 65. It is notorious that the South freely and cordial- ly forgave the North long before the North forgave the South. Our protestations of loyalty, though made by a soldier race ever true to plighted faith, fell on deaf ears and were discredited at the North. The debate in the national House of Representatives be- tween Benjamin H. Hill and James Gr. Blaine in 1876 shows that. It was not until a score of years later when at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War the South sprang to arms in defense of the flag against a foreign foe. that the North fully ac- cepted our professions of loyalty. When the Win- slow drifted, disabled, and helpless out of the harbor 19 at Cardenas with her deck crimsom with the blood of handsome young Worth Bagley of North Carolina, the son of a Confederate Soldier, the first to die in defense of the Stars and Stripes. Then and not until then the bloody shirt, emblem of hate and mal- ice, was furled. "It is a remarkable fact that there are more monu- ments erected commemorating the principles and heroes of the Confederate States, which lived only four years, than have been erected or constructed to any single cause, political, military or religious in the world's history. More books must be written, the story of the struggle must be correct, the judgment of mankind must be just. We, the sentinels, standing now on the shores, can hear the voices of those who have passed over to be with the immortals still call- ing. They bid us be true to the great principles for which these heroes and martyrs died. The hundreds of monuments scattered throughout the South with voiceful stone speak of the matchless courage and the undaunted gallantry of the Confederate soldiers, and of the immeasurable patriotism of the Southern peo- ple. These will live when books are changed; when, it may be, the past may be forgotten, but these im- perishable monuments with their inscriptions will remain for a thousand years ; and when they shall have crumbled into dust before the ravages of time, others will spring up, and they will be renewed, so that the story which they tell will go down through the ages with undiminished light and with unfading glorv, a love song to the Valor of the Confederate Soldier." With pleasurable pride I refer to the high per- 20 sonnel of the Confederate soldier, his polish and fin- ish as a gentlemen, proven by conduct as such. It is true that speaking pro rata, the scholarship of this country prior to the War, was largely south of Mason and Dixon's line. More Southern gentle- men educated their sons at Princeton, Harvard, and other institutions in the North — especially Prince- ton, and more young men went abroad to complete their education than from the North. The truth is, the large majority of Confederate soldiers were edu- cated gentlemen. The result was when the Con- federates made excursions into the enemy's country there were few if any charges of raids upon private homes, acts of rapine, the pillaging of houses of worship, the purloining of sacrificial and baptismal furnishings, the appropriating of family heirlooms, the looting of homes, the tying up by the thumbs of aged persons to make them declare the hiding places of hidden treasures. What a contrast between the march of Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas to the invasion of Pennsylvania by Lee. The explanation is that Lee's army was consti- tuted largely of Southern gentlemen. The mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. The Confederate soldier is coming into his own. Fifty years from the unfortunate, unhappy and unrighteous assassination of Mr. Lincoln finds a Confederate soldier filling the high and honorable office of Chief Justice of the United States. I challenge history to produce the record of any army that went down to defeat, that furnished so many gentlemen qualified to grace the United States 21 Senate, and who did fill positions in that august body with honor and distinction. Also governors of the various States, members of Congress and ministers to foreign courts. So large was the number of gentlemen who belong- ed to the Confederate army who afterward came into high and honorable office, the appelation, the "Confederate Brigadier" was a sweet morsel under the tongue of some of the envious Yankees. My com- rades, history will yet place the Confederate soldier upon a pedestal and his name and fame will go sound- ing down the ages. But I would speak of the Southern soldier in the days of Reconstruction when fanaticism had dis- franchised him and pillage had impoverished him; and I do so without bitterness and without rancor. He was never so admirable, never so superb, as in that trying epoch. A multitude of remorseless and insatiate vultures descended from the North upon the prostrate South in 1865. Where the carcass is there the carrion crow will flock. They were aptly stigmatized as carpetbaggers, and the term has be- come synonymous with all that is vile and infamous and odious in human equation. They seized upon the governments of the Southern States when the bay- onet was at the throat of every 'Southern man. They set the slave to political rule above his former master and they robbed a beaten people with impunity, with- out shame and without remorse. Taxation became confiscation and the fairest land under the sun peo- pled by the noblest race the world has yet produced was separated into satrapies that protected the harp- ies in their hellish work of desolation and atrocity. 22 'It was then that the Southerner, the man who wore the gray, proved the metal of which he was made and he was even greater in the civic conflict than he had been on the field of Mars. Stigmatized as a traitor, disfranchised, robbed of his property, his home ruined, his fields devastated — this man rose like an Olympian demigod, smote the vandals, and they were not. He seized the reins of government, brought order out of chaos, established free govern- ment and enthroned justice, and today his descen- dants are as prosperous in life and compose as fine a citizenship as does the posterity of his Northern ad- - versary on whom the government has bestowed bil- lions in pensions. I defy the historian to point to another such amazing civic exploit, crowned with such brilliant civic victory, in the entire story of mankind. No wonder the Southerner walks the earth, today, the proudest man on God's footstool! The cause was lost, 'tis said. Yes, but is it not re- gained and more vital than it was the day South Carolina proclaimed the Ordinance of Secession ? True the powers of the national establishment have been greatly augmented at the exj>ense of the States — all the States; but what was the "Cause" of the South ? This, simply this, only this — the equality of the States under the Constitution. For that she re- volted, for that she fought, for that she suffered, for that, for a time, she was beaten. But today the equality of the States under the 'Constitution maintains. It is by no one threatened; it is by everyone cherished and defended. It is not a lost cause, for it was the cause of human liberty and constitutional government, based on the equality of the States. 23 The war between the states was fought, really, by the women who stayed at home. Had they uttered a cry, had they complained, the morale of Lee's army would have dissipated in a day. Who can sound to the depth the agony that must have torn the breasts of those brave women, waiting at home for widowhood ? What words can picture the blackness of their nights, the shadow of their dreams, the visions that sprang by day from the detail of their household task? And yet they bore it all silently, except for the prayers they uttered and the sob that nature calls from woman's heart, the tears that brighten woman's eyes. How many mothers were there in those days of stress and storm like her of that touching interlude of Tennyson's : "Home they brought her warrior dead, She neither swooned nor uttered cry; All her maidens watching, said She must weep or she must die. Then they praised him soft and low, Called him worthy to be loved, Truest friend and noblest foe, Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Lightly to the warrior stepped, Took the face-cloth from the face, Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee, Like summer tempest came her tears, 'Sweet my child, I live for thee.' " And how she did live for him, that patient widowed mother of the 'South ; what a man she made of him ; 24 how she has kept true in his breast the best tradi- tions of his race; how she has fed him clothed him, brought him up through poverty to wealth, from weakness to strength, to the high honor of hard work, through the indomitable example that she set! She has made of the sturdy manhood of the South the highest product which a Christian race has yet at- tained. In conclusion I plagerize from the beautiful re- marks of our distinguished Commander, because he most graciously pays beautiful tribute to the Con- federate soldiers. "It was impossible, humanly speaking, to avoid the war between the states. There are those who say it is better that the South had never fought than to have fought and failed. That she lost is no evidence that she was wrong. History contains thousands of ex- amples of where the right has gone down before force. We cannot understand the ways of the Ruler of the Universe, but none can deny that in the adminis- tration of human affairs right and justice do not at all times prevail. The South should ever treasure the memory of her sons as worth more than all the wealth of this great country; which runs into such figures that all human imagination stands appalled before their immensity. "England, with her thousand years of national life and ceaseless struggle and conflict; with her resting place in Westminster for her renowned dead, which is the highest reward that a nation can bestow, has no such riches as those which were laid up in human history by the Confederate States in the four brief years of their existence. There is nothing in West- minster equal to Robert E. Lee. Great soldiers sleep 25 there; great soldiers rest in St. Paul's; but take man and soldier combined, and the Confederate States hold up Robert E. Lee as their contribution to hu- man greatness, and the world is bound to say that his equal does not rest in that great structure beside the banks of the Thames. "As one stands in the Hotel des Invalides, where there has been displayed all that art and genius can devise to create a soft and sentimental halo around the tomb of JSTapoleon, and where thousands go year by year under the influence and spell created about the grave of him, who dying, said,, "Bury me on the banks of the Seine, amidst the people I love so well," — there is nothing there that is as great as the tomb of Stonewall Jackson in the little city of Lexington. Virginia, which rests on the side of the Blue Ridge ; and neither the tombs in the churches, nor the treas- ures of Montmartre, the resting place of France's greatest dead, can produce a genius so brilliant as Forest, or cavalry leaders so renowned as Morgan and Stuart, You may read all the annals of the world which tell of the exploits of seamen on all the waters that cover the earth, but nowhere can you find any- thing that will excel the enterprise, the courage and the genius of our 'Southern sailors — 'Semmes, Maffitt, Waddill, and their illustrious associates in the navy of the Confederacy. You may search all the niches in the sacred precincts of Westminster, and you can continue this search all over the capitols and ceme- teries in the world, but you cannot find the story of a nobler character than that of Jefferson Davis, or one who, amidst the vicissitudes of a great war and helpless to stay the irresistible tide of fate, saw his nation die with a sublimer dignity, with nobler gran- 26 deur or truer courage. The Confederate soldier, thank Heaven, needs no Westminster Ab'bey, nor splendid Mausoleum in St. Paul's. "Thank God, no man can change the past. Its re- cords are written and sealed, and there can be no in- terlineations or amendments. We must open and read the pages as they are recorded by Fate. Be- yond this we ask not to go. The love of truth is one of the noblest impulses which can touch the human heart, and by all the glories of the past we demand that the truth shall be known and declared. Any Southern soldier, or Southern man or woman who asks less is a craven, and who takes less is a coward. "Comrades, we have undergone many vicissitudes, and it has pleased God to bless us with many tokens of prosperity and greatness to come. Let the new generation remember that men are grander than pos- sessions in any State. And when we train the young man for the future responsibility, where will we find among all the sons of earth grander examples of hu- man greatness than in the men who sleep now in their tattered coats of gray. "God be thanked that whatever the poverty of the 'South, when the nations of the earth left her to the rapacity of the myriads, that she retained, and has ever possessed, a quality of manhood, of lofty in- tegrity, and Christian fortitude and serenity, unex- celled in human history." Nothing can more aptly show that the spirit of duty animated the private in the ranks equally with the great leaders than the account of his farewell at Appomattox by Gen. Bryan Grimes., of North Caro- lina, in which he declares: "When riding up to my regiment (who had fol- 27 lowed me through four years of suffering, toil and privation often worse than death) to bid them fare- well, a cadaverous, ragged and barefooted man grasp- ed me by the hand, and choking with sobs, said: 'Good-bye, General, God bless you ; we will go home, make three more crops and try them again.' ' 'Such sublime faith, such adherence to principle, in the face of destruction, cannot perish without fruit, while a righteous God sits upon His throne, judging the hearts of men. ~No land upon earth, no page of human history ever presented a parallel to the Confederate soldier. Let us cherish then, Fellow Comrades, our common heri- tage. Let us link with triple bonds of friendship, those who survive in loyal brotherhood and touch el- bows in the serene and fearless inarch to the end, whither so many noble souls have gone before and are now resting under the shade of the trees. THE END OF THE TIDE Adown the years that come to me In their ceaseless flow to a dim, dread sea, Hurrying on with the tide which bears The sum of our hopes and joys and cares Into the land of the long ago, Or out with the hours we ne'er did know, Into life's broader realms — Come, with a force that overwhelms, Thoughts to me there, as I stand beside — What will there be at the end of the tide? Out of the mists that hide the flame Of the dawn with its dream of a certain fame. When, with their tips of phantasmic fire, Rise the red pinions higher, higher, Whirling aloft in their grand, mad flight, Till the stars hide away in the shroud of night And crushed are the mists of the moldy past — What will there be, when the fogs at last Are lifted away from the years they dull — What will there be when the day's at full? 28 00032757614 FOR USE ONLY IN THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION \M : S N \^